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On Breaking the E-mail Compulsion

Often the blogosphere just points you to great posts. Luis Suarez pointed us/me to this great post on email overload on the tfpl blog. It is titled "Breaking the e-mail compulsion". It passes on some interesting facts about email use and addiction. It goes on to give us some good email tips (which I apply already). But what really triggered me was the big question:

The challenge that I would like organisations and vendors to address is this:

How do we enable colleagues to generate, send and store an important communication about a project within the same application that holds the rest of the documents, communications and information relating to that project?

I can't tell you too much, but colleagues of mine addressed this issue and answered this question to a large extent. I pointed to a paper on this work here. And I hope to publish another paper on this topic with them soon. So, keep in touch!

"Context" and keeping information "in context" is what it's all about. And that is what email is not good at, leading to a large part of our email overload issues.

Comments

That's what we get for turning email into something it's not meant to do.Basically, what we're getting is information that's coming in FASTER, because it's so easy to make noise at the expense of the recipients.

So trying to process this mostly-human activity is like working with a lot of background noise.

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